NBC is shelling out nearly $40 million for a reality game show that will send the winner into space on a Russian rocket.

“It’s going to be hard to top,” said NBC’s entertainment chief, Garth Ancier, told The Post.

“Destination Mir” will dump a group of about 16 Americans into the rigorous Russian cosmonaut boot camp and follow their progress through the five-month training program.

The grand prize is a round-trip ticket to visit the once-ailing Russian space station, Mir.

“My show will be about giving this chance to a very ordinary American,” Mark Burnett, who created the American-version of “Survivor” and came up with the idea for “Mir,” told The Post.

The show, Burnett said, began with a news story about a billionaire who had paid $20 million to be the first civilian in space.

“I thought, how would someone ordinary ever get a chance to go in real life?” Burnett said. “How would they ever get a chance to look at the blue planet Earth from space?”

In the show, Russian space agency officials will eliminate one of the wannabe cosmonauts each week until a winner is selected during a two-hour live finale.

The winner will then immediately climb aboard a Soyuz space capsule and blast off into space for a 10-day trip.

NBC won a lively bidding war among the major networks for the rights to the show.

The $40-million price tag for what will end up as 13 or 14 episodes is about 50 percent higher than the cost of a standard dramatic series.

In terms of shock value, nothing of this magnitude has been tried on TV since Fox was in talks last year to crash an empty 747 jet airliner on live television.

But sending an everyday Joe (or Jane) into space has been a fantasy for millions – and will be a reality for one lucky armchair astronaut.

“The winner will be accompanied by two cosmonauts on the flight to the space station,” Ancier said. “Mark Burnett is really jazzed about this.”

The show is targeted to start in fall 2001 and culminate in a rocket launch sometime between December and June.

Almost half of the show’s $40 million pricetag will be used for space preparation and transportation that Burnett will pay to MirCorp., a Russian company that has leased the use of the space station from the RSC Energia, the private firm that now controls what was once the Soviet space program.

“Mir’s been refurbished,” Burnett said. “They just did a 73-day mission up there to repair leaks and the computers.”